Dartblog

In a blustery house editorial on this second morning of the twelvetide, The Los Angeles Times suggests that Durham prosecutor Mike Nifong drop all outstanding charges against the three Duke men who were falsely accused of rape by (in chronological order) an erotic dancer, left-wing activists at Duke and by, alack, an actual prosecutor. The happy news is that Nifong may face disbarment. The unhappy news is that he still has not relaxed his grip on the three boys’ throats. But he ought to.

IN DROPPING RAPE CHARGES against three Duke University lacrosse players — while insisting that he will continue to pursue other allegations against the young men — Durham County, N.C., Dist. Atty. Mike Nifong has further undermined his already sagging reputation for fairness. […]

Nifong isn’t the only one who profitably could engage in an examination of conscience. Those who seized on this case as an emblem of a “larger truth” — a racial double standard in rape prosecutions, the historical exploitation of black women by white men, the arrogance of adolescent privilege — did not contribute to a clarification of the factual questions that are at the heart of any criminal case. It may be true, as a Washington Post feature put it, “she was black, they were white, and race and sex were in the air.” But in a criminal case, atmosphere is no substitute for evidence.

That simple notion sheds some needed sun on “college justice,” a topic I have written about for a while here. Colleges, for essentially political reasons, desire and possess the ability to prosecute their students for things which are not crimes. (I write not of cheating or cutting ahead in the buffet line, of course, but of things like rape — things which are crimes with legal definitions but with whose definitions colleges, as institutions, disagree.) Colleges desire to terraform the legal code, in a sense. Given their druthers, intercourse without a release form would be rape. A conversation without politically correct platitudes, hate. These are definitional changes the public will never support and which the law does not brook. Colleges, though, are sovereign within their demesne and are therefore able to, say, suspend students for “vexatious oral exchange” or expel them for having been accused of rape. And they rage, rage against the possibility of any of these cases falling into actual courts of law.

This is because of their kangaroo-court evidentiary standards, which are very neatly summed up with that lovely phrase, atmosphere over evidence.